Transact's IDX platform is the company's cloud-based transaction system. Since its release in 2022, the solution has benefited from a series of new features and functions. With a new release automatically pushed to all client campuses every two weeks, these enhancements immediately transfer to the end users.  In this interview, CampusIDNews catches up with Rasheed Bahrooznia, SVP and General Manager for Campus ID Solutions at Transact, to discuss progress with the Transact IDX platform.

One of the exciting things is that every two weeks, we push updates into production. That includes new features, functions, and updates that contribute to the overall good of the platform.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello and welcome to another episode of Campus ID News Chats. I am Chris Corum, publisher of Campus ID News, and I'll be the guy asking the questions today.

The answers will come from my guest, Rasheed Baruznia, VP and GM of Campus ID Solution to Transact. First of all, thanks for being here, Rasheed.

Thank you so much for having me.

Your mission today is to catch us up on Transact IDX, the company's cloud-based transaction system. But before we really dive into what's new, let's cover the basics real quick.

Some of our listeners may not be completely aware of the different platform options, so can you give us the elevator pitch on why a campus should seriously consider a cloud-based transaction system these days?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think it comes down to a couple of pieces.

I think enterprise-grade mission-critical systems are important, and moving systems from on-premise to the cloud is part of that journey.

Transact IDX, we built natively on the cloud. It's a multi-tenant cloud platform built on the highest-level-grade enterprise components and cloud-based architecture. It's been in the market for nearly two years, and we are excited to continue the journey.

Last year in one of these sessions, you introduced us to Transact IDX.

I got to see a demo just a couple of months ago at the NACU conference, and it looked like there's been a lot of changes, additions, enhancements, and things.

So to start, can you catch us up on the progress and maybe what's new on the platform?

Yeah. One thing that's pretty exciting for us, especially with IDX, is our development methodology. So you kind of talked about the features and functions.

One of the exciting things is every two weeks, you push updates into production.

So that cycle of every two weeks, some new features, functions, updates, whether they're large features or even some small pieces that contribute to the overall good of the platform, they're getting lots of new features.

There are over 200,000 students that are actively supported by that platform today, and it crosses over two million transactions.

So throughout that time period, we're pushing updates, we're pushing features, no disruption or any change to those 200,000 users that are using the system, and those transactions are operating flawlessly.

It's exciting to see sort of the scale of IDX, and I think our focus over the last year in particular, was really about continuing that scale and enhancing the platform, which we've done.

Great. So it's pretty clear you're excited about it. What makes it stand out to you?

IDX was about a couple main pieces. First and foremost, operational efficiency.

You talked about cloud and why cloud would be important to some of our clients. I think it goes back to that operational efficiency.

What I just said with our pushing features and functions out in our releases, there's no manual upgrades. Our clients don't need to go through a manual upgrade process, just automatically the updates are pushed.

Because of the multi-tenant cloud platform, we can do that seamlessly and efficiently, quickly to all of our clients. There's no hardware or servers for them to maintain. So basically, we provide the more seamless administration experience for the clients when they're on IDX.

When you've got a cloud platform like this, the second part that makes me very excited about it is it was built for the mission criticality of this operation. So it's an enterprise-grade mission-critical system.

Again, what does that mean?

It means it needs to operate at all times, it needs to be of the highest reliability. And so we built it as such, going through the various architectures and using new cloud technologies.

We also have a lot of third parties that verify our security infrastructure, whether it's SOC 2, state RAM, PCI compliance, and we actually have a dedicated security team that focuses on all those pieces to ensure that it's of the highest mission-critical enterprise-grade system.

So I love that, on one hand, we provide such an efficiency of operation to our clients and of course, the students, but on the other hand, it's of the highest level quality enterprise-grade security.

Great.

It's kind of crazy, thinking back, just a handful of years ago, campuses over and over right here, oh, this will never happen. We're never going to let our data off campus.

We're going to house it forever on-prem, and then sometimes you'd see the campus' transaction system or server sitting under somebody's desk, and you're thinking, oh, that's got to be a lot safer than the cloud, right? So I'm glad we finally got past that and look at us now.

All right, so in addition to all the cloud-based benefits that you mentioned, why else would a school be excited for IDX?

One of the things for IDX, in addition, was we focused a lot on that user experience.

So literally the UIs and the operations, we focused a lot on accessibility and best-in-class platforms and uses, so the experiences are modern, intuitive, enjoyable for the users, whether it's admins, people that are configuring the system, or honestly, students.

So how did we do that?

So one, we did use best-in-class design patterns and created a library that we use to provide a modern, common look and feel, but we spent a lot of time closely working with universities and admins, IT professionals, our partners that integrate the system, and then the students to make sure that the outcomes were meeting the need.

If you've heard me talk and some of our listeners have, we've got a lot of people that have been in the industry a long time. A lot of my team members and a lot of people at Transact were sort of born and raised in higher ed, and so we definitely pulled from a lot of that domain expertise.

With that said, we don't rely on that solely, we like to validate with current users of the system and schools and students, and we spent a lot of time focusing on that, and I think that's really translating well.

Okay, so talk about integrations for a minute. They have always been key to extending a transaction system. How does IDX handle integrations? Anything different?

Yes and no, so it's a really good question.

We have a lot of clients on our existing systems today, and so the first part, with that history and the client base that we support today, we thought it was very important that we support those integrations that are on our existing platforms within IDX.

We've got hundreds of partners integrated, and our clients rely on those integrations for their operations, so the first thing we did is make sure that IDX works with those integrations that we have today.

We did also add some additional API, open API infrastructure into our ecosystem. One way that we do this is through our access control management, so integrating with security providers and access control is very important to us, and ensuring that we have a very smooth way to onboard that.

We have a new API there for that real-time event messaging.

In that spirit of opening up even further, we added even more RESTful APIs into the platform, allowing further integrations. We think we've thought of a lot, and with those hundreds that we have today we think we've got a lot of them covered, but if there's some down the road that we don't, these RESTful open APIs also help support additional integrations into the platform.

On that partnership front, we do have dedicated teams that work on partners and onboarding additional partners into our ecosystem, so if we did happen to need some additional partners that get onboarded to IDX, we have a team of dedicated people that can bring those partners into the ecosystem, so whether it's an existing partner or a new, we've got it covered.

That's good.

All right, we're in the College World Series right now, Go Noles, so here's a softball.

Are mobile credential and IDX are a good combo? I think I know the answer, but tell us.

Yeah, so I think it goes back to your earlier points about cloud, cloud's a journey, and everybody's on sort of a different state in that journey.

What I really like about the combination of mobile and IDX is it supports that migration to the cloud.

What I really like, too, that I've seen a lot of our clients do, we've got hundreds of clients that have onboarded into Transact Mobile Credential, and so whether they're doing that on IDX or on other platforms, it's a step towards that cloud journey, so getting mobile credential on the campus today, and then later migrating their transaction system to IDX, that works.

Cloud doesn't have to happen in one big vein, it can happen in multiple steps, so what I like about mobile credential with IDX is it's flexible. Whether first step moving to IDX and then adding mobile credential, that works great, or adding mobile credential to the system that they have on campus today and then moving to IDX, that works.

The whole end state is operational efficiency.

You got cloud systems where Transact is maintaining and operating them, you've got the operational efficiency of supporting the students, I mean the efficiency of mobile credential on onboarding students and having them have that digital student ID is incredible, and then combining that with the efficiency of IDX really optimizes that student experience.

Okay. For listeners that want to learn more, what can they do?

On July 18th we're having a webinar, specifically talking about the highlights of Transact IDX and diving in deep on the update that we're going to have for the summer. And so on July 18th, I would suggest those that are interested could jump on that webinar and learn a lot more about the details.

Okay, and we'll add a link in the description to that webinar so people can find it easily.

All right. Rashid, it was great to hear the latest, and as always, appreciate you joining us and sharing your insight.

Chris, I really appreciate the time and I had a lot of fun.

And of course, thanks to all of you for listening in, and if you have an idea for a future episode of the Campus ID News chat series, shoot me a note at [email protected], and we'll see you next time.